Unshackling the American Church: The Sacramental

My son and I took the thirty mile drive out east to the Amish area of Adams County. Our kitchen table is giving up the ghost and our original set of chairs is now down to two, with two replacements that themselves need replacing. I wanted to see a man about a table. Not some cheap piece of Chinese fiberboard held together by staples and glue, but one built by a man who cared about the wood he selected and the way the lathed spindles felt in his hands. A man whose shop sign read “Wood Craftsman.”

The store itself was not fancy—is anything Amish fancy?—nor was the design of the furniture. But in running my own hands along the same lines that craftsman’s took, I heard the wood singing.

We don’t have the money now to buy that careful, beautiful table. Can’t afford at this moment the chairs that will someday hold our friends and neighbors as we sit around eating the meal I prepare for them. But I liked the man who made that furniture and he’ll get my future business because he understands the nature of what he offers another man.

Down the road was the organic farm. Not too many organic farms in our area, even among the Amish. The young man who ran the place was happy to talk with someone who grasped what he attempted. You could hear the worry in his voice, though. How many other people understood? Who else would come and buy? This was food the way God intended it to be. Food whose cost in dirty hands and sweat made it all the more sweet to eat. One plant mattered because there were so few, so the care taken to preserve what little was in the ground showed in every future bite. This was food that demanded as much care in creating a meal of it as the nurture this young man gave to it.

Walking back to our truck, a flash of red from overhead proved to be a summer tanager alighting on a phone line. My son and I talked for several minutes about that little crimson singer highlighted against the cloudless cerulean sky. Scarlet Tanager The sun at just the proper angle, the tanager’s feathers glowed in the rays as it warbled. I made sure to ask my son if God was pleased by that little bird He’d made. He gave me a “yes” and together we watched the summer tanager until it darted into the gently swaying oaks.

Later that evening back near our pond, I spotted the summer’s cousin, the scarlet tanager, with its black wings and vibrant red hue, a red that puts the summer’s palette to shame. With the tops of the trees yellow in the setting sun, I glanced back to catch the iridescence of an indigo bunting flitting through the walnut trees, and I thanked God for the birds He created that bless us with their beauty and song.

The Enemy’s work is to oppose God. How does he best accomplish that task? By destroying meaning.

You can’t read God’s prescription for the construction of the Tabernacle and the making of the priestly garments in Exodus without noting a few choice descriptions:

You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth.
—Exodus 25:17 ESV
You shall make a lampstand of pure gold. The lampstand shall be made of hammered work: its base, its stem, its cups, its calyxes, and its flowers shall be of one piece with it.
—Exodus 25:31 ESV
You shall make for the breastpiece twisted chains like cords, of pure gold.
—Exodus 28:22 ESV
Moreover, you shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns; you shall make them with cherubim skillfully worked into them.
—Exodus 26:1 ESV
And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty. You shall speak to all the skillful, whom I have filled with a spirit of skill, that they make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him for my priesthood. These are the garments that they shall make: a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a coat of checker work, a turban, and a sash. They shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother and his sons to serve me as priests. They shall receive gold, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and fine twined linen. “And they shall make the ephod of gold, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and of fine twined linen, skillfully worked.”
—Exodus 28:2-6 ESV

The gold used to make the tabernacle wasn’t just gold. It was pure gold.

The lampstand’s construction wasn’t from this bit and that. It was in one piece.

The garments made for Aaron weren’t just clothes. They were glorious, beautiful, and holy.

And the linen that compromised them wasn’t just linen. It was fine linen.

Most of all, the creators of those items weren’t just workers. They were skilled workers.

While it may be true that to the pure all things are pure, I wonder how many of us in the Church today still understand that the sacred has an enduring quality. That which is cheap and meaningless will not endure, but those things that are consecrated and sacred before God are not forgotten in this life or the life to come. The sacred is costly. To make the Tabernacle cost the Hebrews. They surrendered up their gold, jewels and yarns. But more than that, their artisans surrendered up their time and skills to craft something precious. Gold is easy to refine. Pure gold is not.

Yes, the craftsman’s work honors God. If the Reformation taught us nothing more, we should should remember that all the Reformers understood that craft is blessed by God; therefore our work is sacred when it harbors meaning within it.

But this is not a call to buy that Bang & Olafsen audio system instead of the Emerson. If life is nothing more than consuming and buying, then we have fallen for the greatest of the Enemy’s lies; we have cheapened what it means to be alive.

The American Church’s wholesale abandonment of that which is sacred and infused with meaning for that which is cheap has taken a terrible toll. Our attempts to prove culturally relevant have shown that we value what is cheap over what has meaning, rather than going the opposite way of the world.

The pastor downloads his sermon off the Internet. Cost to him? Nothing.
The worship leader thinks about the morning’s music the night before. Cost to him? Nothing.
Communion that Sunday consists of some mass-produced wafers out of a plastic bag and a gallon of grape juice from Dollar General. The cost…?

Does it matter? Yes, it does—it matters more than we can know this side of Eternity.

So much of what we do as a Church in this country is devoid of meaning. We’ve allowed the Enemy to strip out so many simple and sacred aspects of life that we didn’t notice they’d gone missing one by one until it was too late. Our wholesale chasing after the culture rather than being the counterculture that holds onto meaning and sacrament left the unsaved scratching their heads as to what we really offered. If it were possible, some might contend that we who are the representatives of Christ have treated our the Lord as if he’s just some cool guy who lavishes meaning by giving us what we want. We’ve taken our own lazy lust for the cheap and cheapened our birthright as Sons of the Living God. No wonder the world looks elsewhere for meaning! If we as the Church can’t be trusted to lift up the name of Jesus, what then is truly sacred?

No thankfulness exists for the cheap. The sacred though, commands our thanks. When we receive a costly gift and understand its cost, how can we not be grateful? The heart of the Christian should incline toward thanks because only the Christian understands the depth of the cost Christ paid for our sin. Yet our wholesale abandonment of meaning in other aspects of life makes it all too easy for us to do the same with Christ’s atoning work. Our thankfulness shifts to become the pitiful cry of “So Jesus, what have you done for me lately?” And all meaning in life suffers in that wake.

The sparrow falls to the ground and God knows it because He created it. We, on the other hand, pass by without caring. What is another bird to us? Or another tree? Or for that sake, another person? We Christians may stand against abortion, but why is it that all other aspects of life hold so little value to us that we can overlook them so easily? Our picking and choosing looks more like picking and choosing than a consistent worldview that understands meaning in light of the whole Gospel.

As believers in Jesus Christ, we are a priesthood. As a priesthood, we are charged with conserving that which is sacred. But our focus has been so narrow in that regard that we’ve let the bulwarks fall without thinking and let the enemy saunter up to our gates to assault the very heart of the fortress. Tree, bird, horse, man, Christ? Who cares, right? The latest iPod’s come out!

But redemption offers us true change:

Opening our homes to our neighbors has meaning.
Slowing down to catch the sunrise has meaning.
Listening to our elders tell the stories of our families has meaning.
Caring for a dying parent when it is so easy to let someone else do it for us has meaning.
Taking the time to listen has meaning.
Making something with our hands when it can be bought at WalMart for less has meaning.
Wondering at the splendor of a scarlet tanager has meaning.
Passing onto another generation the God-soaked sacredness of so many aspects of life has meaning.
Making a homecooked meal from the plants we harvested and the animals we raised has meaning.
Creating objects of beauty has meaning.

But most of all, being thankful as we experience God and worship Him in every fragment of our day has meaning. How did we in America let the Enemy so easily rob us of the sacramental?

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series:

“Unshackling the American Church” Series Announcement

Rarely do I read a book that leaves me saying “Amen” after every sentence. More amazing is the fact that this book, while it does deal with Christian thought and living, resides in the Politics section of your average secular bookstore. So dead-on accurate is the content, though, that I’m considering starting a new category of Essential Reading in my sidebar just to house it.

Long-time readers know that I take great care to avoid bringing politics into this blog. But this book is not so much a tome on politics as it is on living a sacramental lifestyle that goes beyond the glitz and gloss of modern-day Evangelicalism in America to a new vision of life that is truly ancient.

The book? Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher.

Dreher’s released one for the ages. In fact, this book is so good that I’m hacked off at him for writing it because what he’s penned is the next book I had planned to write (although mine was aimed more squarely at the Church).

The gist of this book explores a little-known tribe living in the United States: Political conservatives, usually Evangelical Christians, who are dropping out of the rat race by going back to traditional ways of life that existed in pre-Industrial-Revolution America. Anyone who’s caught my epic The Christian & the Business World series is well-acquainted with my views on the dire need for Christians to rise up and question our lifestyles, the non-stop, community-destroying, materialistic live-for-today zeitgeist we’ve adopted indiscriminantly.

As the subtitle proclaims, the book gathers under its wings the disenfranchised out there who firmly believe that conserving the family unit, better stewarding creation, restoring genuine community, and overseeing local market economies by restoring America’s agrarian heritage, will recapture the essence of what it means to live a full life that honors God, family, neighbor, and country.

Weeping is not my normal reaction to reading anything, but this book has so far uncorked a torrent in me. And while too many Christians in America brush all this off as utopian nonsense—even as they adjust the volume on their latest in a string of iPods and munch on genetically-modified tasteless veggies—I’m imploring readers of this book to check it out, if only for the first few chapters.

Despite the finale of the subtitle, I’m personally not interested in saving the Republican Party, but I am for saving conservative values—even if truly conservative values look more like some of the elements of the Left than the Right. The kind of conservativism championed by Edmund Burke in no way bears any resemblance to the “free-markets-at-any-cost” stupidity we see enshrined by today’s GOP, but that’s okay. If enough of us drop out of the prevailing societal madness, someone will notice and want to court our vote.

Though Dreher’s beaten me to the punch, I know that you know I’ve been talking these points for a while, so in concert with my reading of Crunchy Cons, I’ll be starting a series called “Unshackling the American Church” that will further examine many of the issues I’ve touched on at Cerulean Sanctum, ideas that dovetail with Dreher’s book.

Stay tuned. I promise a mind—and possibly soul—altering ride.

***

Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series:

“Unshackling the American Church” Series Announcement
Unshackling the American Church: The Tyranny of Modernism
Unshackling the American Church: The Sacramental
Unshackling the American Church: Treasuring the Creator’s Handiwork
Unshackling the American Church: Cultivating Essential Beauty
Unshackling the American Church: Fraternitas
Unshackling the American Church: Mammon

Monergism, Total Depravity, Creativity, and the Imago Dei

'The Scream' by Edvard Munch If you’ve got grass to mow, I’ve got more—about nine acres.

Our house sits on 13.2 acres of rolling Ohio farmland. I suspect about four acres of that is wooded, but the rest is grass. Our orchard dots some of that grassland, but I still have to mow around the trees, so it counts. I’ll drop about one and a half acres of grass once we put in our vineyard. (We live in the Ohio Valley Viticultural Area, the largest wine-grape-growing region in the United States. You can put a lot of Napas in here.)

I’ve got a 35hp full-size Kubota tractor that pulls an 8′ finish mower deck. The whole grass-cutting process takes about 5 hours.

That gives me a lot of time to think. The great thing about having land is there’s nothing fast about it. Whatever you do to it takes time. Doesn’t take a lot of brainpower while you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing to it, so the mind can concentrate on other things.

Today, a question trickled through my thoughts and I had some trouble reconciling it logically. That’s why I’m opening up responses. If you’ve got some insights, please comment.

Disclaimer: What follows is NOT a teaching. It’s a question I’m posing for my own benefit so I can better understand the issue. It should in no way construe any indication of questioning orthodox Christian belief.

Now for my tractor meditations…

I was thinking about the Imago Dei, the idea that Man is made in God’s image. Not that our physical appearance is like God’s, but that our spiritual state is. We reason, create, and appreciate beauty because God has those traits in Himself and has imbued us with them.

Total Depravity is the condition of Man after the Fall, unable to connect to God because of sin and spiritual death. (See 1 Corinthians 2:14; Genesis 6:5; Romans 3:10-11)

It should follow that as a result of the Fall, Total Depravity dealt a crushing blow to Imago Dei.

The problem begins when we ask how severe that blow was.

Since Total Depravity is truly total, one would think that the Imago Dei would not so much be damaged as utterly annihilated. If it is the spiritual state of Man that is the Imago Dei, then the spiritual death wrought by the Fall should have destroyed the Imago Dei altogether. Dead is dead, not semi-alive. If the root of sin is that deep, then Man would have nothing left of the Imago Dei, or at least have nothing of the Imago Dei that could remain to produce anything sin-free.

Even considering that view, four possibilities remain:

Total Depravity is total; the Imago Dei was completely annihilated.
Total Depravity is total; however, some of the Imago Dei remains pure.
Total Depravity is total; however, the Imago Dei remains but is tainted in such a way that nothing pure comes from any of it.
Total Depravity is not total; this explains why the Imago Dei remains.

All of those positions have problems, however.

#1 is problematic because it is clearly false. I still reason. The very act of me typing this post is a sign of reason—and creativity. I linked words together creatively.

#2 is problematic because it would insist that Total Depravity does not extend to all parts of fallen Man’s being. More on this one later.

#3 is problematic because one could argue that there are things that Man creates that are perfect—or at least profoundly good—that would argue against taint. For instance, in what way is Handel’s Messiah “imperfect” as a piece of music? Or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata? One could say that in order to be perfect, those works would have to appeal to all men at all times in all places. But is that the true test of perfection? Yes, the instruments used to play those works may not be in perfect tune, but the idea of those works as they existed in the minds of those composers would mitigate that issue.

The other problem about #3 is asking the other side of the perfection issue: In what way are those works tainted by sin? Yes, their creators are tainted by sin. There’s no reason to believe that Beethoven was ever a born-again Christian, so this muddies the water further, since the Moonlight Sonata is sublimely beautiful. There is evidence that Beethoven wrote that piece in mourning for an unrequited love affair with a married woman, so his motives for writing it are questionable. But the greater question of the purity of the work as a work unto itself remains.

Lastly on #3, one must ask if a pre-Fall Adam could have composed a piece of music more perfect than the works mentioned.

#4 is problematic because it denies Total Depravity altogether.

The title of this post brings up monergism, that Man has no ability within himself to reach out to God in order to receive forgiveness and salvation. God’s grace through the Holy Spirit is irresistible and God’s use of it alone accounts for conversion. The counterpart to monergism is synergism: Man has within him the active ability to reach out to God and effect—with the grace afforded him by God reaching down to him—conversion.

Considering #2, one could argue that if parts of the Imago Dei remain pure, then those pure parts are the source from which Man can effect synergistic salvation. Obviously, monergists would reject that idea outright.

That #3 is a struggle, though, for other reasons. If the Imago Dei is a spiritual condition and Man is totally spiritually dead to the point that monergism is the only possible outcome, how then can any of the Imago Dei remain? This takes us back to point #1, which is clearly false. Nor does it answer the question about the possible perfection of things that Man creates.

If one argues that the spiritual state of man is dual in nature (that the soul exists apart from the spirit and that this allows the spirit of the unconverted to be dead while the soul—the part that manifests the Imago Dei—is still alive), then you’re arguing for a tripartite nature of Man (body, soul, and spirit), a position that most monergists don’t support.

A person arguing that common grace explains how fallen Men who do not know Christ can still create objects of beauty confuses terms. The Imago Dei is by nature; it is innate because it reflects God’s own nature in some form in Man permanently. Common grace is not innate in that none of it ever issues from Man, only from God. If the Imago Dei persists after the Fall, then its source is of innate nature and not common grace.

Others would argue for the neutrality of created things, whether they be created by God or Man. A cliff created by God may be a neutral moral agent, but if it falls on you, you’re still dead. Music or other arts also have no innate moral agency if you follow the line of thinking that many use, but this says nothing about their beauty and whether that beauty is perfect or not, or whether there are levels of perfection that might distinguish God’s work from Man’s.

Tough questions. If we divorce the Imago Dei from the question, then everything is easily answerable. But factor it in and the logic becomes more difficult to untangle.

Which of those four possibilities above do you most believe and why?